Applicom

Work anywhere: technologies to move your business online

Once upon a time, going to work implied commuting from your home to your office, and -- most importantly -- implied that everybody had to have their "office space". It used to be a desk. Then it became a desk with a PC. Now, it has often evolved to a desk with a laptop. What's next?

The next step is called "freedom": it implies that you can work wherever you are, whenever you need to.

Mind you, the world will always need receptionists; and a warehouse will always need people who actually take the goods from the shelves or greet you at the checkout till.

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Every customer's the right customer

It's no secret that here at Applicom we have recently changed: we used to work mainly on custom programs for customers. This could have been an AJAX backend, or a page-reload web site, or an automatic backup procedure. If you know the IT world, you probably know that customers' requests can get pretty wild. Customers seem to humbly and fearfully ask if it's at all possible to implement some very basic features, and... then they seem to demand, very naturally, the most impossible things.

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Good software doesn't mean incomplete software

Imagine for one second that you had to make a choice. On your left, you have an incredibly complex machine with 100 different flashing buttons and indicators and LEDs and -- why not? -- a lot of beeping noises. On your right, you have a very simple panel with five buttons, no noise, and only a couple of analog instruments.

Those two machines have something very important in common. Can you see what it is?

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Using Apollo to develop Apollo

Developing something like Apollo is very challenging -- and very rewarding. What's most rewarding, is knowing that we are using... Apollo, in order to develop Apollo. Yes, that's right!

Apollo is a pretty big project, and it requires intense collaboration amongst those who work on it. I am the project's black sheep -- I am in Australia, which is a little "out of the way" so to speak. With the rest of the team a few thousand miles from me, we use Apollo every day in order to make things happen.

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